The present invention relates to the field of Web services and, more particularly, to unifying related Web service ports using port pointers in proxy mediation.
Web services description language (WSDL) is an interface description language, defining the syntax of protocols used for network communications. WSDL is organized in a hierarchical structure, with data definitions, message types, operations, ports, and services. A port defines a set of messages and binds them to a specific transport and data syntax. For instance, Internet domain name service (DNS) can have two ports, one port which accepts User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic and another which accepts Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic.
Although WSDL provides a means to reuse different elements using naming conventions, several problems with repetition and verbosity still exist. Often a service provider will use a single service that provides the same operations over multiple protocols. Some WSDL files associate several ports for a single port type, each with a different binding. For example, one might use SOAP 1.1 and another might use SOAP 1.2. There is currently no way to link these two ports, even though these two different protocols are effectively identical. Further, no easy way exists to explain to a proxy using WSDL code that one port form should be mediated to the other so that a backend server need be concerned with only a single port.